


Debts to Pay

by semele



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-18
Updated: 2018-03-18
Packaged: 2019-04-04 10:04:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14017866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/semele/pseuds/semele
Summary: It’s not like Raven accepts gifts easily.She likes them, of course, and there is a whole list as to why. She likes them because why wouldn’t she; likes them because they feel nice; likes the thrill, and surprise, and novelty. Most of all, Raven likes the thought that someone has been thinking about her hard enough to have something to show for it. In her experience, it’s not that often that words and feelings and strong enough to transform into something she can touch.





	Debts to Pay

**Author's Note:**

  * For [growlery](https://archiveofourown.org/users/growlery/gifts).



> File under: I got an awesome prompt, then wrote a fic about something else entirely. Whoops?
> 
> Prompted by growlery for [Bellamy/Raven Soft Prompts Edition](http://ravenbells.tumblr.com/post/172005704604/bellamyraven-soft-prompts-edition), prompt: "sharing food".

It’s not like Raven accepts gifts easily.

She likes them, of course, and there is a whole list as to why. She likes them because why wouldn’t she; likes them because they feel nice; likes the thrill, and surprise, and novelty. Most of all, Raven likes the thought that someone has been thinking about her hard enough to have something to show for it. In her experience, it’s not that often that words and feelings and strong enough to transform into something she can touch.

But a gift, she learned young, is a tricky little thing. If she can reach out and touch it, then someone else can grab it as well – grab it and seize it, and hold it over her head even though she didn’t ask for any of it. Not all gifts turn out to be free, and someone like Raven might suddenly find themselves in a debt so heavy it hauls them all the way from space and back to the ground.

All in all, after that and many other harsh lessons, you can’t really blame her for being cautious. There are so many things that come with a price to pay, and Raven has to become a miser, because it feels like day after day, she is shrinking from everything that gets taken from her, as if there is less and less Raven left to pay. It’s not that she is suspicious, you see. It’s just that, the less she has left, the more wary she is of losing even more.

So when the people around her decide that enough is enough, and they want to move out of Camp Jaha, she jumps to the chance to get away, but even though she marches out arm in arm with Bellamy and Sinclair, she carries her own backpack all the way to the new site.

***

In a way, things are easier in the new place. They start out with simple tents, just like old times, but then there is planning, there is gathering, and hunting, and hauling, and it takes Raven a week to realize that someone else is building her home and preparing her food. At that point, nothing really feels like a gift anymore – Raven and Sinclair are both elbow-deep in scrap metal, busting their asses to figure out how to make drinking water happen, and she knows it’s in everyone’s best interest to make sure neither of them wastes time scavenging for berries.

Okay, maybe she doesn’t know that right away. Maybe, at some point, Bellamy needs to give her a dirty look and remind her not to be an idiot. Either way, it makes sense. She is paying upfront this time, paying with her work, and time, and expertise. Later, she’ll have to be cautious again, but now she doesn’t have time to shield herself. There are too many lives in her hands.

When their little sturdy huts are ready, and Raven gets assigned the best one, the one with a little bit of extra isulation, she huffs and puffs and refuses, knowing full well that she’d feel a bit hurt if they hadn’t done it. Maybe there is something a little bit broken inside her, something that makes her keep either hurt or suspicious, with nothing in between. She wants good things, she does, she craves them so much it almost hurts. She is just scared of the price she might be made to pay.

In the end, Bellamy Blake asks in this special, soft voice of his if she’d want to room with him, and that changes things immediately. They built the huts following Lincoln’s advice, one for every two or three people, so there is nothing strange, really, in Bellamy wanting to live with her. His request doesn’t affect who they are or what they do, but it does make Raven grab for her assigned hut with greedy, greedy hands, yes, I’ll take it, of course I will. I have someone I need to keep warm.

It doesn’t occur to her until much, much later that maybe he asked to live with her precisely because he knew it was the only way to make her accept that she, too, needs to learn how to keep warm.

***

As soon as she moves in with Bellamy, gifts start sneaking up on her like cunning little things. He has, she realizes, a way of giving that isn’t obvious; he doesn’t announce, or tease, or make that little pause to graciously allow Raven to thank him. Bellamy Blake gives her things like they belong to her already, and he is so seamless about it that even Raven, in her eternal caution, is fooled for a moment.

To be fair, the circumstances, too, are against her. All people in their new village might have places to live now, and they run a shared kitchen for one warm meal every day, but Raven and Sinclair’s work isn’t done, not by a long shot. After they’ve figured out transporting drinking water from a nearby stream, there is still building greenhouses, and securing the premise, and trying to figure out how to use all those solars they managed to steal from Camp Jaha. Raven has her hands full, and it seems fair that it’s Bellamy who does their laundry, brings their firewood, and forages the woods for breakfast food. It takes Raven a few days to realize that while she pays back to the group with her work, there is nothing she does specifically for him, in exchange for the work that he does for her. When she tries to insist that it’s her turn to do laundry, he looks at her like he doesn’t understand a word that she’s saying, and then he leaves her with a sinking feeling in her stomach, no, don’t, wait, don’t go.

What will you take away from me when you realize I can’t really pay you back with anything of worth?

She spends four long evenings in her workshop after that, poring over a pile of broken things they hauled here all the way from the Ark, but no matter what she does, she can’t quite make things work. She designed greenhouses and plumbing for an entire village from scratch, but for some reason a simple broken e-reader is eluding her, as if it knew how much she cares about getting this right. Bellamy loves books, it’s beyond easy to notice. Whenever he gets pensive, or soft, or quiet, it’s like his whole head drowns in stories that he now has to re-tell himself from memory, because there is nothing else around that would be able to give them to him. If Raven can’t fix this for him, what is she even good for?

So on day five, when she wakes up in the morning, and sees a bowl of berries ready in front of her, she imagines it resting like rocks in her belly, heavy and harsh, like a sign of a debt unpaid. Bellamy needs to leave early, scheduled for a shift building a wall around the village to keep away predators, so he never knows that she doesn’t eat a bite.

***

The next few days are more difficult than they should, because it’s not like this is the first time she’s skipping meals. She’s gone soft in this hard-won village she helped build from scratch, it’s simple as that. They got her used to the good stuff; to gratitude, to warmth, and to food on the table every single day, even if she did nothing to put it there. Look at how weak she is from that: Raven Reyes, getting lightheaded from a few days without breakfast, as if that’s something she needs to live.

She should’ve known better than to take food from a warm-eyed boy, and expect there would be no price to pay.

Three days later, the unthinkable happens, and Bellamy stays behind in the morning, stalling as if with a purpose, and watching her from the corner of his eye. Only now does it dawn on her that he might’ve noticed her new attempt at self-preservation. She never threw out the food she didn’t eat, just returned it to the crate where they store it, so of course he noticed that the supply was dwindling slower than it should. It’s not that she thinks he’s stupid – she just never expected he’d be paying attention.

“What’s wrong?” he asks quietly, like she is some wounded animal. “If it’s not good, I’ll bring something else tomorrow. You don’t have to… You can tell me these things.”

In the end, she guiltily eats half a portion, because there is suddenly nothing she can think of that she could say.

***

Even though days pass one after another, Raven still makes no progress on the e-reader, and it feels like there must be some tiny but obvious thing that eludes her; something she really should’ve known better. It’s just an e-reader. She fixed her first one when she was ten. Why can’t she just fix this one?

The more she struggles, the smaller she gets when she comes home, until she takes up no space at all. Her clothes never need washing, and she should stay away from the fire, wary of stealing warmth she didn’t make happen with her own bare hands. Bellamy seems weary in the evenings, all heavy steps and bruised hands, his shirts perpetually drenched in fresh sweat. His eyes are heavy, too, or at least that’s how they feel when they follow her around the hut, silently accusing her of causing all this. His disappointment, it seems, is the price she has to pay, and it’s not the steepest she’s ever faced, but for some reason, it hurts in some small ways that the others did not.

It’s another week until she can confess, because that’s how long it takes for her to make peace with the idea that she needs to move out.

“I tried, okay?” she says brashly, angry at him, herself, the whole world. “I tried to fix it for you, but I can’t... “

“What did you try to fix?” he asks, puzzled, because of course he doesn’t know. He didn’t even give her enough credit to expect that she’d do all she can to pay him back.

“Look, I wanted to give you your books back. But I can’t even do that.”

Then suddenly he’s laughing, and pulling her into a hug that’s a shock to the system. It’s all warmth, and solid frames, and safety, and something in Raven crumbles when it’s given to her without a second’s hesitation. For the first time, even she can’t find a way how she’d be made to pay back for something that’s given so freely, no matter how precious it is.

“You tried to do what?” he asks, bewildered, and pulls back just enough to see her face. “Why would you even do that? Work after hours? You’re exhausted as it is!”

But he keeps her close even as he’s scolding her, and laughing, and holding on as if all tension is slowly seeping out of his body. How did he even manage to build up this much tension?

“I wasn’t doing anything _here_ ,” she tries to explain, but he just shakes his head like it doesn’t compute; like she doesn’t know how to get into a head that’s so full of stories, no more than she know how to fix that fucking e-reader.

They end up sharing a bunk that night, and for the first time since Raven landed on the ground, warmth feels not like something owed or hard-won, but like something shared.

***

It’s just a night, of course, and it doesn’t really fix things. Raven doesn’t magically discover that there are things in the world apart from owing and paying. She doesn’t dream up a way to fix the e-reader, or fix herself like it’s one big, clumsy metaphor. 

But the next afternoon, when Bellamy heads out to a stream a bit further down to do their laundry, she comes together with him, and tells him about the first radio she ever fixed while he scrubs her shirt clean with a handful of sand.


End file.
